


Dress-Up Doll

by Jennifer-Oksana (JenniferOksana)



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Afterlife, Dark, F/M, Homage, Mental Instability, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-06
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-05-18 07:17:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5904691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JenniferOksana/pseuds/Jennifer-Oksana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The truth is not what Mulder thinks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dress-Up Doll

“And I feel– And I feel like I just got home,” the radio screams at  
me. I check the clock again. Five forty-eight. I have twelve minutes  
and exactly twelve minutes before he arrives, rumpled and careworn  
from his day at work. If I don’t look just right, he won’t be happy.

I go to my closet and throw it open. On one half of the closet is  
my stuff, jeans and t-shirts and cute dresses. On the other half is  
the stuff he bought me. Professional clothing. Suits. Blouses. Heels.  
I rummage through them carefully. Today is Wednesday, so I’ll wear the  
demure navy one. I pull it out and find a nice white silk blouse to wear  
underneath. I lay it out on the bed carefully and bend down to find the  
high heels. I hate heels but he has to have them, these three-inch  
torture devices. I find a neat pair of navy ones and then I close the  
closet.

Next I go to the bathroom mirror and survey myself. Five feet three  
inches (and boy, did that disappoint him when we measured me) of petite  
beauty. My hands immediately go to my flame-red hair. Do I need to  
schedule another dye appointment? My hair is naturally a dirty blonde and  
before I met him, I wore it long and loose and wavy. Now it’s in a prim  
and proper red pageboy. Blue eyes. Pale skin that I don’t dare tan  
anymore. Nope. He threw out the one bottle of self-tanner I had and  
screamed at me for it. I stare at my face like it’s a stranger’s.

“Why would I want a nose job?” I ask my reflection. He was begging me  
to do it. “He’s the one who needs a nose job. I don’t want to go  
through that bullshit.”

I leave the bathroom and get dressed down to the heels, and then go  
back to the bathroom. I get myself perfectly made-up. I wondered at  
first if he were gay, the way he knew exactly what sort of make-up to  
get me. Now I know it’s different and much, much more terrible.

Five fifty six. I hurry to my dressing table and grab the perfume,  
do a light spritz on my wrists and neck. Then for the final touch, I  
put on the gold cross I must wear. I’ve seen him angry before but the  
one time I forgot this little item he nearly hit me.

In the mirror, I look myself over one last time. I don’t look  
like myself. There’s a picture of me attached to the mirror that’s  
only six months old, and for all I look like that image I might as  
well be someone else.

Six o’clock on the dot. There’s a familiar knock at the door.

“Who is it?” I ask.

“It’s me,” he replies. I hurry to the door, and unlock it. He’s  
waiting there, my wounded man, with his dark thatch of hair and  
suffering hazel eyes. My man. I smile at him with all the sincerity  
and love I feel for him.

“I like what you’re wearing,” he tells me. “It’s very becoming.”

“Where are we going tonight?” I ask. “Do you have a restaurant in mind?”

“I thought we’d order in tonight,” he replies. “Chinese. I’ll order.”

“I want to go out,” I reply. “We always order in.”

“We need to talk about the nose job. Privately.”

“I don’t need a nose job,” I say. “Fox, please–”

“I’ll pay for it. I told you that I would. And remember, don’t call  
me that, please.”

I look at him nervously. He stands there in all his sartorial glory,  
a sleek suit perfectly fitted and tailored. A slight buzz of  
five-o-clock shadow colors his face, fitting with the soft shadows  
beneath his eyes. He doesn’t sleep, not really, not in all the time  
I’ve known him. His eyes are bleeding with pain, pleading with me,  
accusing me for something I had nothing to do with.

I have to explain a little about Fox.

His full name is Fox William Mulder, and he’s a Special Agent with the  
FBI. I guess the stereotype of cops with bad girls isn’t so off, me  
being less than his class here. Anyone, he went to Oxford, joined up  
with the Bureau and eventually found a job in the basement, working  
funky-ass cases. Bigfoot, werewolves, alien abductions– you name it  
and my man Fox has seen it. He had a partner from 1993 on and from  
what I understand of it, she was everything to him.

What I understand of it is what he’s told me. He’s an odd fellow,  
my Fox. He tells me everything and then nothing. That’s how he is  
about everything, famine or feast. But it was only once that she  
was explained, even though *she* is here in every moment.

Her name was Dana Katherine Scully. Bright girl, beautiful woman and  
you guessed it; she had red hair, blue eyes, pale skin, and a petite  
figure. It’s her cross I have to wear when I’m with him. It’s her image  
I was remodeled in for him. It’s her arms he wants to be in, because  
he was too frightened to go for it during her life.

I have no fucking clue about what happened in her life or their joint  
life. From the vague and few instances he’s bothered to talk, I  
figure she suffered terribly but went on like some sort of saint or  
holy relic. The only concrete thing I know is that she was kidnapped  
once for three months because of him and he will feel the sweet and  
exquisite guilt of that until his last breath.

Of course, I also know that she’s dead. Dead and buried. My Fox didn’t  
tell me how she died but during the day I have some free time, so I  
went and found out. It happened nine months before I met him on a  
cold and barren January day.

FBI woman, chasing down a suspect in a case that didn’t have shit  
to do with Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster and everything to do  
with drug dealers and gunrunners and urban decay. Flash of scarlet  
hair and forthright form, following the bastard into a warehouse.  
The sound of two bullets fired. Scream of a woman whose lung is  
pierced by one of those bullets.

Cough of that woman as she watches the blood seep out in a great  
scarlet puddle, darker and richer than even the color of her hair.  
Tears of my man as he reaches her too late. Stains on his favorite  
suit as he cradles her in his arms and murmurs the words. Stay with  
me, love, and don’t die.

One small pale hand stained with crimson. I’m sorry. I loved you.  
I can’t stay. Last spasms of life rack through her and the light  
fades. Scream of my man as her eyes lose that sparkle that made them  
more precious than all the sapphires of the world. Scream of my man  
as he loses his frail grip on this world around him.

Madness. Dizziness. Six months spent in a quiet white room, listening  
to music and being spoon-fed and shot up with tranquilizers. Six months  
of a shock so profound and a sorrow so endless that he could only  
inhabit the echoing empty hallways of his mind and soul.

Then he came back. That’s another thing I don’t know any too much  
about and that is his recovery. Well. The truth is that he hasn’t  
recovered all the way and never will. He just adapted and made his  
madness work for him.

“Fox,” I reply. “It’s not the money.”

“You love me, don’t you?” he asks. “You love me. Do this for me.”

“Will you love me?” I say with a biting voice. “If I become her, can  
you love me?”

“I do love you, I do,” he replies with his soft lying voice. “You’ve  
saved me. You.”

I guess I should explain a little more about that. Who I am isn’t  
important. I’m nobody special. I’d moved to DC for no good reason,  
and was trying to get along while trying to pick up a graduate degree.  
No family; I’d left them all behind. I wasn’t making much money  
except for fleecing men.

You must understand that I look like her. Even before the hair and  
all, there’s an uncanny resemblance. I was lonely, too. There was  
nothing really in this world for me before he fell into my lap,  
all need and desire.

We really did find each other blindly, like something out of a movie.  
He saw me on the street walking home and because of the resemblance,  
he decided to pursue me. I was lonely and I was a fool. I fell in love  
with him because he became my ardent suitor. I fell in love because  
I needed his need.

He started to pay for my life, and make little requests. Dress like  
this, do this, do that. Most people would laugh at how I did everything  
he wanted. I cut my hair and dyed it. I started wearing her clothes,  
anything to make him happy. But you cop to the fact he made me happy?  
I was glad to do things for him. I thought he loved me because he knew  
I’d do anything for him, because I adored him.

He doesn’t love me.

“You don’t love me,” I whisper. “You love the pieces of her you see  
in me. That’s all you’ve ever loved.”

“I love you! You manage to stay with me. She left me–” and he begins  
to sob, great wracking sounds that break my heart. “Stay with me.  
Don’t hate me.”

“I don’t hate you,” I told him. “But you don’t need to do this.”

“You don’t understand. I’ve been looking for the truth all my life.  
Once I thought the truth was finding my sister Samantha. Then I thought  
it was proving that the government was lying about the existence of  
extraterrestrials. You don’t know how many things I looked for thinking  
I was looking for the truth,” he says. “But I know what the truth is  
now. And I had it so close to me all those years.”

“What truth is that?”

“She was the truth. She had it right,” he murmurs, moving close to me.  
“I lost it. But I want to find it again.”

“The truth isn’t a dress-up doll, Fox. You can’t just decide it’s one  
thing and force it to fit your image of it. You can’t make me over  
into her image, because I’m not her. She wasn’t truth.”

He laughs, and I feel my stomach churn in terror. His eyes, his  
lovin’ eyes aren’t so loving anymore. They are focused on me so  
intensely I want to melt or evaporate or disappear.

“Baby, we’re gonna go for a ride,” he tells me. “You’re gonna find  
out what the truth is.”

He grabs my arm hard but he doesn’t have to. I’ll go with him to the  
ends of the earth. I’ll go beyond for him. No girl would unless she  
was crazy. Guess I’m crazy.

“I’m coming with you, don’t worry about it,” I whisper. “Don’t have  
to hurt me.”

We rush down the stairs, hand in hand. Out to his big old car, actually  
a modest sedan type thing. A Federal agent’s car.

“Where we goin’, baby? What depths of time shall we investigate as  
Mulder and his replacement Scully?” I ask as he opens my car door  
and I slide in.

“What are you, a poet or a hooker? Make up your mind for god-damned  
once,” he replies, getting himself to the driver’s seat and revving  
up his mid-sized American suburbanite-mobile.

“You too, Oxford Boy,” I reply. He shoves the key in the ignition and  
off we go, down the Beltway. The radio’s loud and mocking. When he’s  
angry, he’s a lousy driver. He’s angry. “Don’t talk to me like that.”

“You think you know what I’m thinking. You think you get it, just  
because you figured out how she died? And you know how she died,  
don’t you?”

“She was killed in the line of duty,” I reply lamely. “It wasn’t  
your fault.”

“After all those conspiracies and plots and brushes with death, to  
have her killed so vulgarly–” his voice breaks. “Her death was  
meaningless! Senseless! What sort of God, what sort of world lets  
that happen?”

If we weren’t in the car and his driving weren’t so terrible right  
now, I’d try to give him some cold comfort. I want him to feel better.  
I want him to stop being lost in the past. He kept driving, into  
Maryland, onto the tree-lined highways to the accompaniment of some  
alt-rock station.

“Fox, you don’t have to do this!” I plead. “Let it go.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” he replies, and takes off the next  
exit. We drive down the windy, confusing Maryland roads that make me  
dizzy. Finally, we’re there.

The warehouse. In a little industrial area, yeah, and it’s so dark.  
Dana Katherine Scully was killed here nine months ago at eight forty  
five at night. I check my watch. It’s only seven sixteen. It’s barely  
dark, really. Yet I couldn’t be more afraid if it were midnight on a  
moonless night. We get out of the car, Fox and I, and he stares at the  
warehouse with a fascination I can’t explain. I realize he hasn’t been  
here since that night. Of course.

“This is the place,” he murmurs. “This is the place where I lost her.  
Come on. I’ll show you just how it happened!”

I can’t see his eyes. “No, Fox.”

“Run into that warehouse.”

“We don’t know what’s in there, please–” I beg. “Mulder, it’s not me.  
I’m not her.”

“Go in there!” he screams at me. “Get in there, now!”

I start to cry, but I run as much to get away from him as to comply  
with his wishes. In my head my jeering little comment runs– the  
truth is not a dress-up doll. The truth is not a dress-up doll.

Am I? I run faster, through the grass towards the warehouse door.  
I let myself become his doll. Her image, his salvation. He has to  
prove to himself that he wouldn’t let her die. That it was all a  
mistake.

“Scully!” he screams, sprinting after me. “Scully! Watch out!”

I can’t break from Fate. I sprint– how I do it in these heels is  
beyond me– I sprint into the darkness. Into the warehouse, into his  
welter of terrified and confused memories. I fall into their final  
moments, as real as if I was a witness to it.

Scully ran after the suspect into the dark. He knew the place, she  
didn’t. In the dark he could hide. She must have spoken, followed  
protocol–

“Federal Agent! You are under arrest!”

Mulder’s too far behind. The suspect had the drop on her. The gun  
fires– BAM! Into her lung! But that momentary burst of light and  
sound alert her to his presence and so she shoots back. BAM!

Does the suspect fall down and die? I never learned that from the  
newspaper article. I want to believe Scully took him with her. I feel  
the bullet wound as surely as if I were hit myself. I fall to my knees,  
the warm blood soiling my serene and conservative suit. No, not mine.  
Hers. I’m not hurt. What color was her suit? I want to know.

Gasps of death must follow. The feeling of blood flooding your lung  
and drowning you– God, what an image. Drowning on blood. I relive  
each moment as though I was the one struggling to breathe.

Mulder enters. That image must have been blazed into her dying eyes.  
Fox. Long and lanky and frightened. God, how he loved her! She knew  
before he ever dared tell her. I know this. Drowning on blood, shivering  
as the warm blood surrounds her in a pool. Fox.

“Mulder!” I call weakly. His eyes widen and for a minute I realize he’s  
reliving this in a way I can’t. In his eyes I am Scully again, dying.  
Leaving him.

“No! No! Not again!” he screams inhumanly. He rushes to my side, his  
hand finding the exact place where the wound is. But my flesh is whole.

“Fox,” I whisper. “It’s not me. I’m going to live. I’m going to stay.”

His sobs torment me. Back and forth he rocks me, murmuring nonsense  
words. I’m not hurt. I make out a fragment of his incoherent sobbing–  
“it should have been me–” and I push him back.

“Is this the truth you’re looking for?” I ask. “What is it that you’re  
hoping to find here? Her? You think maybe she’s been waiting here for  
you? She’s dead. She loved you. It’s not her fault or yours.”

“You love me,” he murmurs. “Why?”

“Because I do,” I reply. “Because it’s my choice. Because it’s the way  
things are.”

“I wanted you to be her,” he accuses himself. “You’re not Scully.  
Scully’s dead.”

“Yeah, baby, she is,” I whisper. “But you’re not. Can we go home now?”

He rises, looks down at me. In the dark I can’t see him clearly. He  
extends a hand to help me up. He extends a hand to help me up. I take  
it. He pulls me up.

BAM!

I’m falling again. I’m flying. In the distance I hear another shot and  
a scream. Is it me screaming? I don’t know what’s happening but it hurts  
and everything’s not quite right–

“NO! Not again! Not this time!” he screams. I blink and blink as I  
try to move. I can’t move. I can’t figure out what’s happened to me.  
There is a long period of silence, and then he comes back.

“Don’t die. Don’t die on me, dammit!” he orders me, taking me into his  
arms.

I’m falling through a fog and I can’t do anything. I can’t move. I can’t  
breathe. I’m drowning, and the water tastes strange because it’s not  
water, it’s blood and all of the sudden I see her.

Scully. The genuine article.

“Please–” I hear Mulder wail from beyond forever. “Stay with me. I  
can’t lose you again.”

“He doesn’t understand, does he?” I ask her. She smiles a soft enigmatic  
smile. She shakes her head so gently

“No, he doesn’t,” she says in a voice that doesn’t resemble mine at  
all. Not one bit. “Someday he will.”

I look at him and wonder at how much I love him still. He crushes my  
body to him but I can’t feel it. I can’t feel anything. She looks at  
him with such gentleness and such love. He can’t stop what’s coming.

The truth is not a dress-up doll. The truth is not one thing that  
will suddenly make all the other puzzle pieces fall into place. The  
truth is the puzzle. The truth is so much more than Fox can understand.

I die, but that is not the end. But the words to explain it are not  
there, and I can’t think of any more to say.

He wails, and I want to comfort him but I can’t. Scully looks at me and  
I know that it’s time to go. Right before we do, I look at him with a  
broken heart and ruffle his hair one last time.

Because I can. Because I love him.

Because that’s just the way things are.

 


End file.
